Microsoft is killing off a popular feature in the next version of its Windows Home Server product, which is codenamed ‘Vail’.
The software vendor said that it would get rid of its Drive Extender technology from Vail, much to the chagrin of its customers.
Microsoft announced it would axe Drive Extender – which supports multiple …

Or...

Not true

If WHS were expensive, maybe, just maybe, I could agree - but it isn't! My WHS box cost less than most RAID NAS chassis to buy, and yet does a heap more than pretty much any NAS box I've seen. It has a real server OS, and as a result is fully configurable. I run apps directly on it (my weather station software for example, a website staging host, a flash based internet music server, media server, etc etc) as well as using it for storage, backups and restores. All for under US$400 including hardware and software.

Size is not everything M$

“Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses."

Any good sysadmin knows that a couple smaller disks will out-perform a single larger disk of comparable capacity due to better seek times and ability to retrieve data in parallel. If you are looking for speed, go with multiple drives.

Why would...

Not quite in context of the product

To a certain extent you are correct when the full picture is using a form of RAID striping. WHS didnt split files accross drives, it just replicated them so you always only got the speed of a single drive anyway making your comment irrelevant.

What MS have done here however is made WHS worthless. DE was the single best standout feature of any server I've ever seen. From a perspective of capacity and ease of upgrading hard drives using different sizes and even mix of connections to provide pooled storage with redundacy and upgradability without data loss was fantastic. I've used WHS for a few years now and was stunned by this decision.

I will now be looking at alternaives for a replcement to my WHS soon. MS=FAIL on this one :(

Not in Concat mode.

Drive extension on HWS is concat (CDD), not RAID (MD). So it gives _NO_ performance bonus.

This funnily enough has been touted as a feature even by someone on the reg reviews a while back - you can take the drive and supposedly stuff it in a windows box for recovery which you supposedly cannot with Linux based NAS.

In any case - my take on this is "You get whatever Xmas you deserve". I will stick with my Debian file server setup thank ya. It is a combination of MAID and RAID to the tune of 5TB and counting.

@BristolBachelor

Why can't you plug the NAS disks into a Linux box if they were RAIDed? 99.9% of the dual (or more) disk NASes that are within the realm of consumer affordability are running Linux, use "md" for the RAID, and usually use an ext2/3/4 filesystem.

OK, if a disk fails, and the user created RAID0, they're screwed... But that's RAID 0, not the NAS or Linux's fault.

oh well

Ah, but

Microsoft have thought of that! The current version of WHS will have some inherent limitation that will make it incompatible with something to come in future.

That's why you have to upgrade Microsoft Office every time they launch a new version. They purposely change all the file formats, so your old copy can't load anything saved out of a new copy, and if you want to read any of your friends' documents then you have to upgrade your version. Or explain to each of your friends how to save in a format which is compatible with yours, and yes it's OK to lose some formatting and so forth.

What a bunch of idiots

Drive Extender is the one compelling reason for using WHS over a "simpler" NAS solution and it works brilliantly: I've just set up a WHS on an old laptop I had and plugged in half a dozen external drives that I've accumulated over the years. The result was over 3 1/2 TB of space in one big lump

Without Drive Extender, WHS is pointless complexity over a NAS, with it it makes complete sense

Use Linux

Hmmmmm....

"What Greyhole isn't¶

* Production ready! It's still in beta state. The current version (0.6) codename is It should work "

I know WHS isn't the most reliable and bombproof solution in the world, but I think it's still in slightly better shape than Greyhole. Still, the project is hopefully guaranteed an influx of contributors now, so maybe 1.0 will be available soon.

I'll take

Historic quotes?

"Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses."

No, no, no MS!

Those suggesting a Linux alternative are missing the point - WHS was always meant to be something the average person with a bit of networking knowledge could implement, it wasn't meant to be a thing sysadmins could play with in their spare time. It was meant to be a set-up-and-forget solution offering not just NAS, but automatic backups of clients and a HD pool so you could simply add an extra (or replacement) drive and not have to reconfigure anything. It was about server-based home networking for the masses. OK, like many of MS's dreams it never achieved that, but the OS and the associated hardware was certainly up to the vision.

The following quote from Microsoft’s Home and Small Business Server Team General Manager Kevin Kean:

Drive Extender was a neat feature, but the implementation was off, and we discovered some application compatibility and disk tool problems related to its ability to correct data errors on the fly. We don’t want to give customers problems; we want to give them solutions. So ultimately, we decided that we needed to cut out Drive Extender. Removing Drive Extender will make file shares easy, and it’s possible to accomplish most of its features otherwise. For example, you use the server’s centralized backup or even RAID as an alternative to data duplication.

So the solution is...

Yup, dumb move.

I've put WHS into a couple of tiny - 3 seat max - businesses as an automated backup/storage box and it worked very nicely. The fact that they could increase storage at any point without reconfiguring was extremely popular.

Not so much on the Reg; every time there was an WHS box reviewed, you could hear the commentards howling about "WAT NO NAS THIS SUX LOL" from five sites away. So I guess those guys'll be happy now.

Design error

According to Paul Thurrott it's because they tried to extend the functionality into the small business arena - but it couldn't cope for various reasons so they canned it across the entire product line.

Massive shame really (and a massive cock-up from MS), I have been using WHS for some years and this is one of the killer features. If it is released in this state I will have to look to other solutions (Drobo?) when upgrade time comes.

In reaching for the the (presumably more lucrative) Small Business environment they seem to have completely lost track of the original goals.

2TB sufficient???

I use an appreciable portion of a 16TB RAID array for a not especially large DVD collection. Add Blu-ray into the equation, and it'll probably need to become 24TB or 32TB pretty soon. A 2TB drive will rapidly fill up, and being unable to add another drive and have their storage automagically extend could well be a stumbling block for a large portion of WHS's target market.

How to lose your own argument.

Mir auch

Sigh

Earlier this year I abandoned my ageing Buffalo Terastation as I was reaching it's 0.75TB (RAID5) capacity. After much musing on the replacement I went with an HP MediaSmart server with WHS.

One of the reasons was that I couldn't afford to populate all the drive bays in one go and WHS allowed me to simply add drives as I went along. It now has 1TB and 2 x 2TB drives. Going for a "real NAS" and fitting 4 x 2TB discs in one to set up RAID5 go was too pricey and rebuilding the file system when adding a new disc seemed to be regarded as an "at your own risk" activity when researching, although I'm sure I'm about to be told I'm wrong by someone more knowledgeable.

The only real complaint I have with my WHS box is that HP is waaaaay way behind in keeping it's included TwonkyMedia server up to date (yes I know there are ways to run a later version, but for the moment the extra effort isn't worth it).

However with this decision by MS I feel the platform I bought into has been abandoned, I can't recommend it to anyone else anymore and I will now start thinking ahead to my next NAS box.

ZFS FTW!

As a WHS user

I have an HP WHS for just over 2 years now. The original hardware design was (IMO) limited because it only had 512MB but apart from that I really like the hardware and the O/S. To me the DE isn't that much of a big deal. I love the fact that it does automatic backups of the Laptops, Media Streaming, Automatic sync of my photos to about 3 other places. Maybe it's just because we have been flooded that the backup features are more important to me than the DE.

Like Xbox removing gaming functions

In related news, Microsoft will be removing the gaming capabilities in future Xbox 360 releases. "Following extensive consultation with business customers we have decided to focus on the core Xbox social networking functionality" said Microsoft Senior Executive Vice President Mitch M. Mitchkinsonson. "We realise this will be a disappointment to some of our valued Xbox customers, but we feel that re-focussing on the core product competencies will syngergistically leverage our modalities."

No active routing since Vista

Dumb, dumb, dumb!

Over the years I've been a reluctant user of Microsoft software, and pointed potential users at almost anything other than the stuff from the boys at Redmond. That was until I discovered a magic wee machine from Acer loaded with Windows Home Server. Cheap as chips, it simply does the job it was designed to do. Add a drive, any size, internal or external, and add it to the storage pool - and the space appears and is usable pretty much instantly. Want to drop a drive out? Mark it as no longer in the pool, wait till the drive light changes colour, and pull it out. No disruptions, no drama, no waiting for a RAID array to rebuild in either circumstance. All while maintaining a single cohesive file system structure. What's not to like here?

And now as someone else has said, Redmond has delivered both barrels into it's feet. sigh

Become a Laird, buy up Scotland 1 sq ft at a time.

My view is that they are trying to use as much of the same base code for the next iteration of Small Business Server, and Home Server as they can to save dev money. As some have alluded to WHS has had some gains in the small business areas because of its automatic backups, sharing of data, and the ease of use. All of which appeal to "micro" businesses that have hosted email with their own domain, or more likely their ISP hosted mail.

My guess is that they couldn't get Drive Extended to work with Exchange and SQL Server, which are core services in SBS, due to the way drive extended replicates and balances the data around the drive pool. That probably breaks databases.

I seem to recall an earlier issue with the Drive Extender fixed in Power Pack 1 regarding Access databases.

I use WHS, I think it rocks. But I get mine through Action Pack subscription, I do think it's overpriced though.

Bad marketing?

So here we are in a recession. Some of us - and I stress it's not me - will be hard up, and M$ say "freely available"? To people without work and money this is going to have the same ring, exactly the same ring, as "let them eat cake". Sure, the monarch in question didn't know that the French people didn't have cake and was answering the question literally, and that is my point.

It is this kind of carelessness that will lose M$ customers, especially given the advances in other operating systems, including Linux.

M$ can't afford to have this easy come, easy go attitude, especially during a recession, especially when competitors are nipping at their heels. I am amazed at their attitude, and I say this as someone who has just bought a bare metal notebook and installed Linux on it. Clearly I am reconsidering Microsoft's role in the world.